Unpublished Jackets

During the 1970s, C&RE designed jackets for several New Naturalist titles that were, for one reason or another, never published. At this stage the designs were all prepared from colour separations which were then combined photographically by the printer to produce the completed jacket. To guide the printer, the artists usually produced a colour sketch of the design which, although it gave only a rough idea of its final form, reproduced the desired colours accurately. Jackets were never printed for these missing titles but fortunately the sketches were preserved and so can be reproduced here. Using today’s computing technology, it would now be possible to combine the surviving colour separations to produce an even more accurate representation of what these jackets might have looked like.

LICHENS

C&RE designed two different versions of a New Naturalist on lichens (above left and centre), one a view of a building beyond a lichen-covered wall and overhanging branch and the other a close-up of lichens on a stone wall. The book was commissioned in 1972 when it was hoped that Dr Peter James, then at the Natural History Museum, would find time to write it. By the early 1980s, plans for the title had changed and it was projected as a symposium-like production with multiple authors edited into a seamless whole by Dr Mark Seaward. This book was published elsewhere, but the New Naturalist lichen book was eventually brought to a triumphant conclusion by Oliver Gilbert in 1999, and given a Robert Gillmor jacket.

THE FOX

The Fox was originally intended to be a New Naturalist monograph, but its eventual jacket design indicates that it was later promoted to the mainstream series. A string of distinguished authors had been asked to write it, and a full text was eventually completed in 1974 by H. G. Lloyd. It was at this stage that C&RE were asked to design a jacket and came up with this sketch of an alert-looking fox looking down from what appears to be a branch. Unfortunately the text was over-long, and, for this and other reasons, the book was withdrawn and published elsewhere (as The Red Fox, Batsford, 1980). Had it remained in the series, The Fox might have weighed in at about number 60, next to British Birds of Prey.

SEAWEEDS

This striking jacket sketch of kelp fronds swaying in the tide was probably drawn in the mid-1970s after Dr William Eifion Jones (1925–2004), a Welsh marine botanist, had been commissioned to write a New Naturalist on seaweeds. Unusually C&RE draw it in crayons instead of gouache paint. Unfortunately the book was never finished, and the title was temporarily dropped from the series in 1984.

WAYSIDES

This was to have been a volume about the wild plants and animals of tracks, roadside verges and railway lines. The commissioned author was the coincidentally named Dr Michael Way, then part of the distinguished Monks Wood scientific team that had already authored Hedges, Pesticides and Pollution and Man & Birds. C&RE designed this lovely jacket in the mid-1970s, probably at around the same time as Bogs and Fens and Seaweeds.

BOGS AND FENS

A New Naturalist about peat bogs was first suggested in the early 1960s by a then unknown university botany lecturer called David Bellamy (there is a file note to say that ‘we must find out more about Bellamy’). The book, expanded to Bogs and Fens, and then Wetlands, was pencilled in as a desired title, and at one point it was hoped that David Goode, then assistant Chief Scientist in the Nature Conservancy Council, would find time to write it. This attractive jacket sketch by C&RE featuring Snipe and Bog Asphodel was probably drawn in the mid-1970s.